The Email Marketing Council’s Legal Data & Best Practice (LD&BP) hub has been reviewing the current email marketing best practices document over the past few months, and the publication of a revised version is imminent.

One of the things that the review process has identified is a need for more detailed guidance in certain key areas of the email marketing customer life cycle. For this reason, a number of supporting white papers have been produced, which can be found in the “Toolkit” section of the DMA’s website (www.dma.org.uk/toolkit), where they are available for download free to Members.

Here’s a quick summary of what has been produced to date:

Deliverability: Aimed at email program owners who have realised that their broadcasts are experiencing delivery problems, and are trying to identify why this may be the case. Looking at key factors such as sender reputation, spam filtering, blacklist operators, the document provides common-sense guidance on how to deal with them, including 10 easy-to-follow steps to improve your email deliverability.

Creative: Good creative is still an important determinant of a successful email campaign, and is sometimes the only connection a subscriber has with your brand. This document demonstrates that email creative is not a dark art requiring witchcraft and technical know-how! Rather, in non-technical language, it provides some easy-to-implement recommendations that will quickly optimise the performance of your email campaigns.

Data Analysis & Segmentation: Sets out a simple process to help email marketers start segmenting their data, and analysing their results. It defines five key areas to focus on, including: setting objectives; finding the right data; choosing the right segments; different segmentation models, and; effective use of segmentation. It also examines the best methods and approaches to implementing segmentation, as well as how best to interpret the results.

Split Testing: Provides email marketers with the basic capabilities that they will need to run split-testing activity. It looks firstly at the fundamentals that need to be in place to run a split testing program, and then examines ten prime opportunities where split testing can be introduced into any email marketing program to identify the optimal approach to maximise campaign response rates.

Triggered Campaigns: Delivering timely and relevant email messages, using trigger-based email marketing, plays an important part of email best practice. By analysing subscriber behaviour and identifying meaningful changes and/or events, organisations can communicate with their customers at a point when they are most likely to be receptive. This strengthens customer relationships by making them feel valued, and it is not unusual for trigger-based emails to attract high open rates as a result.

In addition to the documents that have been described above, there are also three new white papers whose publication is imminent:

• Using 3^rd Party Data For List Rental & Lead Generation
• A Layman’s Guide to Email Marketing Law
•  Email Lifecycle Marketing

And there are a further two which are scheduled for arrival during Q1 of the New Year:

• Organic List Growth
• Measurement & Reporting

The production of these documents is a collaborative process and the Email Marketing Council, as the representative body of the much larger interest group, is constantly feeding in new ideas about key issues which email marketers would like to have expert guidelines for. Hopefully, the documents described in this article are servicing this need, but it would be great to have direct feedback on whether they are useful, and what the email marketing community would like to see produced next. If you have any feedback for us, then drop a line to email@dma.org.uk , or online via LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter.

Guy Hanson Chairs the The Email Marketing Council’s Legal Data & Best Practice (LD&BP) hub. He is Director, Response Consulting for Return Path.

Deliverability remains one of the most discussed challenges in the field of email marketing, so I think it rightly deserves its place as the most written about and talked about area of the business for beginners and experts alike. As inboxes evolve and their sophistication continues to increase, new approaches to email marketing programmes are needed to ensure that legitimate opt-in email is not only received – but anticipated.

The Evolution of Email Deliverability:

1. The Dark Ages of Email Marketing. In the early days of email deliverability was a free-for-all. Email messages from personal contacts, brands and spammers flowed freely to inboxes.
2. The Vigilante Years. Soon thereafter blacklists were formed to keep a record of notoriously bad senders, and those lists which are still in use today are often a form of self-policing by the Internet community.
3. Reputation 1.0. The next evolution in deliverability was based on reputation – more specifically IP address reputation. ISPs maintain a list of abuse complaints, hard bounces and other unsavoury characteristics of sloppy senders to penalise those individuals and companies whose practices prompt cries of help from recipients.
4. The Intelligent Inbox. With a few hops, skips and jumps in between we currently find ourselves in a world where meeting those previous bare minimum requirements may get your message into the inbox, but it will likely not get your message viewed, read, or acted upon. In this world:

a. Inboxes are being prioritised intelligently to separate bulk email from more personal, bi-directional interactions. (See Gmail Priority Inbox)
b. Recipient behaviour and interaction with messages are helping inbox providers determine message placement and overall delivery.
c. New tools in today’s inbox make purging messages and banishing non-relevant senders and brands to the Junk box one-click easy. (See Hotmail Sweep)

3 tips can help improve your deliverability in the world of the intelligent inbox:

1. Acknowledge that engagement is the key to the kingdom. ISPs and inbox providers often vary in the approach they take to determine message delivery, but nearly all are beginning to focus on one consistent measure of whether a sender is reputable or not – and that is ENGAGEMENT. In the world of the intelligent inbox, consumer engagement with your email marketing messages is critical to continued email deliverability. Recipient opens, clicks and forwards are becoming as much a predictor of relevance and authenticity as unsubscribes and complaints are to abuse.

Focus on creating messages that drive engagement and activity and you’ll be well on your way to improved deliverability.

2. Meticulously monitor your online reputation. Spammers burn through IP addresses as they plague consumers. And whilst that practice of provisioning a new IP address and opening the floodgates used to fool the system – it can no longer. Reputation is a hard-earned and constantly-monitored reflection of your email marketing habits. And, increasingly, it is being tied not just to IP address but to your domain and the infrastructure through which you send your messages. Monitor your reputation relentlessly; Have your email provider prepare regular reports for you to help you monitor the reputation of your IPs and sending domains; Or, use third-party services to assist. Most importantly, respond quickly to any fluctuations in your online reputation.

Your online reputation is as important as your credit score. Monitor it continuously and respond to any fluctuations promptly.

3. Authentication must be at the core of your efforts. Sounds geeky, but it is a foundational element of deliverability. Either your company or your email service provider should have your sending domains properly configured for a range of authentication services currently in use, including: Sender Policy Framework (SPF), SenderID, DomainKeys and DKIM.

Authentication technologies are similar to your passport or biometric scans – they help prove to ISPs that your company and your email messages are who they say they are. Do yourself a favour today and ask your technical team or your email service provider to verify which authentication schemes you are currently provisioned for. And, if any of the four boxes above are left unchecked, take quick action to get that authentication in place.

One of the contentions that surround email marketing at the moment is the issue of when you retire an email address. Leading up to Christmas, when the heat is on, ambitious sales targets tempt even cautious marketers to push out the boat and send to everyone. If an email list is causing deliverability issues, it is quite common for a bit of a clean up to be suggested. It’s not a “stab in the dark” strategy, because when used correctly it can lead to a net increase in response and revenue.

However, you cannot ignore, when retired email addresses are mailed, they often produce some revenue. This almost flies in the face of the no response/retirement strategy, but in reality, some fine tuning is in order to squeeze all the value from your list.

To deal with this issue properly, you will certainly need response (sales) data for your customers, and need to know which email addresses the data relates too. In most instances the full picture of your list can only be achieved through wider knowledge of the customer.

All too often, the most responsive customers are the ones who have been opening and clicking your emails recently. But it’s also important to segment those who are no longer interested, from those that have disengaged from your emails due to a higher contact frequency than their needs require.

The first stage of the solution should be test the differing frequency of those people who haven’t opened or clicked for a while. Although a 6 month open/click window might be fine for some businesses, it might not suit those businesses with a longer sales cycle or a wider range of buying frequency. In these instances, sending mailings for twelve months or even longer might be better, but proper testing should help you decide when a customer is signalling defection.

If you have transactional data, you can use the principles of RFM (Recency, Frequency and Monetary value) to build up a model which predicts your most responsive customers. In an ideal world you could marry up the purchase RFM data alongside the online engagement data, to see the point where Recency for online engagement (opens/clicks/visits) signals a lapsed customer.

Using email response data, we create two segments, those that are recently engaged, and those that are not (don’t throw any away yet!). The engaged segment can carry on receiving the main campaign emails at the normal frequency. The less engaged segment now gets a rest (for about three to four times the normal frequency of you campaign emails). So if you generally send weekly, rest this segment for a month.

What we are trying to do is identify a segment within the email database that has stopped responding to emails due to a mailing frequency that is too high for them. By responding to the users behaviour, you are able to make changes to the email frequency of this group.

If people from this lower frequency segment, respond, it is important that they don’t go straight back into the main campaign mailing frequency, but give them more of a rest between mailings.

What we are trying to do is to start down the road of mailing people at a frequency that suits them, keeping them engaged and encouraging them to buy more. Managing frequency is the easiest way to respond to behaviour (or lack of it) but if you have more resource, you could try content too. One of the other top reasons why people stop opening emails, is that the emails are no longer relevant to them. The difficultly with content relevance, is that it relies on a deeper customer knowledge, or web behaviour data.

Unfortunately there will be those email addresses in the list that despite your best efforts will never be responsive again. So, at some point you will have to bite the bullet and let these addressees go. It is important to accept that the damage that is done to the whole email programme (in the shape of poor inbox deliverability and reduction in response) will outweigh any extra revenue gained by mailing these inactive email addresses.

I grew up reading Dr. Seuss books and my favourite story happens to be “How the Grinch Stole Christmas.” I’m not a huge fan of the Christmas season, and I suppose that part of me secretly sympathizes with the Grinch’s refusal to make merry. There’s something about the irreverence of his all-consuming glee as he snaps up presents, stockings and Christmas trees from each house in Whoville that I can’t help but enjoy. Horrible, I know, but that’s the truth of it.

Even though the Grinch’s antics never fail to amuse me, I’ve come to realize that some in the email marketing industry find a little too much similarity between the Grinch’s attempts to prevent every “Who in Whoville” from having a happy Christmas and the ISPs filtering of their legitimate, permission-based Christmas emails to their consumers and prospects. The fourth quarter of the year is often the most crucial for businesses, especially retailers, and the pain of being bulked and blocked is never felt more strongly than at this time of year.

Having your messages sent to the junk folder or blocked all together can certainly be enough to dampen anyone’s Christmas spirit, but the reasons behind these filtering decisions are actually related to marketers’ sending practices. While the Grinch’s issues with Christmas may be fairly complex (“It could be his head wasn’t screwed on just right. It could be, perhaps, that his shoes were too tight. But I think that the most likely reason of all may have been that his heart was two sizes too small”), filtering at the ISP level all comes down to one primary factor: your sender reputation.

A high reputation ensures high inbox placement, while a low reputation means bulking and blocking. According to Return Path’s latest Sender Reputation Report, 77% of deliverability issues are caused by a poor sender reputation. So instead of blaming the ISPs, who are tasked with protecting their users from the massive amount of spam being sent year-round (95% of all email sent is spam), it’s time to focus on how your practices may be negatively affecting your sender reputation.

How can you ensure that ISPs view your emails as “nice” rather than “naughty?” By paying attention to the following six factors that impact sender reputation:

1. Complaints: the result of subscribers clicking the “This is spam button” in their email client, which registers their complaint to the ISP.
2. List Hygiene: related to how you are managing your data, and how clean it is. If it isn’t, you’ll see a higher percentage of spam traps and unknown users.
3. Infrastructure: related to how your mail server is configured and whether or not your messages are authenticated with various protocols like SMTP, SenderID and DKIM.
4. IP Permanence: whether or not you maintain consistent mailing volume over the same IP addresses. Spammers tend to “pop up” on an IP, blast their messages and then disappear.
5. Message Quality: the content of your emails and whether or not you have links, images, text or code that triggers spam filters.
6. Engagement: whether or not your subscribers are interacting with your messages, or just ignoring and deleting them.

Of these six factors, complaints and list hygiene weigh the most heavily on your sender reputation. For more information about keeping complaints to a minimum and ensuring your list is squeaky clean, check out my presentation from last week’s JUMP Conference.

So don’t blame the Grinch – or the ISPs – when you find your Christmas emails are being kept out of the inbox. All of the factors contributing to your sender reputation are within your control. However, you can’t fix what you don’t measure. Get started by finding out your sender reputation at this free resource: www.senderscore.org.

The term spam trap gets used a lot in email marketing especially when talking about deliverability. They are difficult to spot, changing all the time and can seriously damage the reputation of the sender. Most large ISP’s and spam filtering companies use spam traps and the consequence of landing in the various traps differs. Landing in a single spam trap might not cause you too many problems but land in the same trap several times or land in multiple related spam traps and you could find yourself blacklisted.  Rather than trying to spot them, the best approach is to try and avoid them altogether.

A spam trap is an email honeypot and in its simplest form this is an email address that is used to collect spam emails.  Unlike a spam filter however, it doesn’t try to recognise what is spam and what isn’t, it just assumes that everything it receives is spam. It can do this because the email address is never used by a real human being and has never been subscribed to receive any email. Hence anything that gets sent to the address is unsolicited email.

You can create your own simple but crude spam trap very easily. Create an email address and publish it on your website in a way that is invisible to a normal user.  An automated harvester will come and collect the email address and eventually over time you will start to receive unsolicited emails. Spam traps of this type are very successful in identifying lists that have been harvested from WHOIS records of domain names, websites and Newsgroups.

Another type of spam trap involves taking a once valid email address and after a period of time converting it to a trap. Many ISP’s such as Hotmail, Google and Yahoo adopt this approach with old and abandoned mailboxes that are no longer used. The addresses will normally be left dormant for a period. The exact length of time varies and is unclear but it is thought to be between 6 and 18 months. During this time the email address will normally return a bounce to indicate to non-spammers that the address is no longer in use. Hotmail might return an error such as “550 Requested action not taken: mailbox unavailable”.

Using list hygiene techniques the email address would be removed after a pre-defined number of bounces. Spammers generally won’t remove the email address from lists because of a bounce so when the address gets converted to an spam trap they will continue to use it.

So how do you know if you are sending email to spam traps? This is something you want to know before your reputation is damaged and you suffer from deliverability issues. If you are using an Email Service Provider then it is likely they will monitor this for you and let you know if a list you are using is causing problems. If you are sending your own emails then some ISP’s have services that can help. Microsoft has the Smart Network Data Services (SNDS). This service tells you how many spam traps each of your IP addresses have hit and the complaint rate.

If you are hitting a number of spam traps then how do you remove them and avoid it happening again? As you would expect, the people that operate the spam traps are obviously reluctant to tell you which email addresses are spam traps and there is no way to visually identify a spam trap as it looks like a normal email address.  Microsoft say on the SNDS FAQ page “We recognize that providing the actual trap messages would be useful to legitimate businesses trying to clean lists or customers that are hitting these accounts, however this is another unfortunate case where the risk of the data being useful to spammers is too great.”.

The best way to avoid spam traps is good list hygiene and management. Always remove hard bounces after a number of failed delivery attempts and look at segmenting your data into engaged and non-engaged recipients. You should try and re-engage the users who aren’t opening or clicking on the links in your emails and if after a period, maybe 6 to 12 months, there is no activity then they should be removed from the list. If you do acquire new data then make sure you know the source of the data and don’t combine it with your existing lists until you are happy that the data is clean of spam traps.

Driving home last night, I saw a dead badger on the roadside, and I started ruminating on similarities between dead badgers and email marketing programs ! Not so much from the perspective of being a bit flat, somewhat run down, or showing the first signs of decay ( although all of those are potentially applicable ). Rather, that badgers are notoriously shy, so to be able to estimate their population size, a simple rule of thumb is to take the number of dead badgers on the roadside, and multiply that number by 10 to arrive at a rough estimate of the number of living badgers in that area. The key point is that an apparently small cause can provide a pointer to a much larger effect, hence my unlikely association between badgers and email marketing.

Consider spam complaints. Provided that they are being monitored ( that’s another point ! ) they will form around 0.1% of a good sender’s broadcast . Such a small number is easy to ignore, but it can point to bigger issues:

• According to Return Path’s recent Sender Reputation report, 0.1% equates broadly with a sender reputation score of 90+, with the program achieving ISP accepted rates in the high 90% as a result. By comparison, a complaint rate of 0.4% maps roughly onto a score somewhere between 50 and 80. The corresponding accepted rates decline markedly – anywhere between 27% to 88% – as a result.
• There is also churn to be considered. Let’s say you have an email list of 1M addresses, sending on a weekly basis. That 0.4% complaint rate equates with losing 1/5 of your subscribers over the course of a year, and every single one of them is leaving because they are unhappy with your program.

Unsubscribe requests are a similar case in point. The most recent edition of the DMA’s Email Benchmarking Report shows average opt-out rates for retention campaigns at 1%. As above, that small percentage actually provides the frame for a bigger picture. There are also some additional points to consider :

• Leading on from my comments about spam complaints – if you aren’t reporting on this metric, and are only using unsubscribes to measure levels of disaffection with your program, then you are under-reporting the true state of affairs by a probable factor of two, and possibly more.
• Disengagement should also be regarded as a form of opt-out. Your recipients may not physically request their removal, but if they stop responding then they have become “emotionally unsubscribed”. A re-activation program is your first step, but all the non-responders should then be opted out.

Another small number that can conceal bigger issues is bounce rates. The same DMA report shows average bounce rates for retention campaigns as 2%. Using the same example as above, you would lose your entire database in slightly under a year at this rate !

But there is another alarming dimension to this metric – bounce rates for new subscribers are nearly always substantially higher than the average bounce rate for your entire list. For example, if new subscribers form 2.5% of the total broadcast, then an average bounce rate of 2% might easily mask a new subscriber bounce rate of 20%. To counter this, email marketers need to be doing the following :

• Report separately on the first-broadcast performance of new email addresses.
• Ensure new registrants have a strong imperative to supply a good address.
• Validate new addresses using a process such as double entry, or confirmed opt-in.

So – at the risk of mixing my metaphors, my advice is to look between the trees ( the small numbers ) and see all the badgers that are frolicking in the woods ( the larger considerations ). Learn to interpret these metrics, and act quickly on what may at face value appear to be small variances. In this way, you can remain confident that the first whiff of putrefaction really is coming from that poor badger alongside the A5, and not from your slowly decaying email program instead !

There’s no doubt there is a change afoot in the email marketing industry. Despite  all the best practice mantras (“must segment more”, “this year we won’t look like spammers”)  it is becoming plainly clear there is a divide growing between those who have stuck to their New Year resolutions and those who have not. Email is becoming the strongest digital media channel deployed by the modern marketer, but to make the most of it, you need to know more than how to push the “spam now” button.

The email channel has arrived with many businesses now acknowledging the importance of the channel to their business model. But despite the importance of the media, there has not been uniform treatment when allocating budgets..

This has been borne out in the recent DMA email benchmark report, that concluded there are “two classes of email marketer; those sending simple campaigns and those splitting lists into multiple segments” concluding ”A major divide has opened”.

The “haves” and the “have nots”

The latest Marketing Sherpa email benchmark report backed up this class system, but seemed to suggested the reason for lack of budget was due to some marketers not being able to justify (or measure) overall ROI. It also suggested that the segment of marketers who were investing liberally were in a “strategic phase of maturity” where they could measure ROI and segment effectively.  Unfortunately the research also revealed only 36% of the companies surveyed measure response by list segment and just33% measure revenue per email .

So it would seem that those organisations investing heavily in email marketing, are those that are best able to measure its ROI and effectiveness, and are best placed to know is value. So, how do you get your email marketing to the strategic phase? And what moves can be made to pitch for extra budget to drive the revenue the email channel can really generate?

Measure email’s influence across multiple channels

Trying to convince the board to allocate more budget to a media that is cheap, that you don’t need to invest much money in to get a return, is tough.

As email marketers, we’ve probably all sat round tables where we have discussed spikes in call centre activity and website traffic following an email campaign. The problem is proving these increases in activity come from email. If these revenue streams are not attributed to email (at least in some part), the budget for developing the media further will never be available.

So, mirroring the findings of the Marketing Sherpa report, if you want achieve more budget for your email campaigns, you need to make sure you are measuring its true value.

The value of Influence

I know it’s a bit of a contentious subject in some circles, but the value of email communication moves far beyond the last bit of revenue that was attributed to the last email sent (and last click). it’s the measurement of that value that provides the greatest challenge for the modern marketer. Over the last couple of years I have noticed that when you directly relate a person’s revenue value, against their open and click behaviour, they relate very closely. So closely in fact, that in some instances 80% of online and offline sales will come from the customers who are regularly and recently opening and clicking your emails. An interesting thought; this means someone who opens and clicks an email, is worth more than one who doesn’t. Factor that one into the equation when working out the value of your email list, and you soon see the people who open and click emails are worth far more than those that don’t (10+ times the value is not uncommon).

Segmenting for Influence

If the recipient is reading your emails, they can be influenced. If they can be influenced, you can encourage them to buy more. And that’s the important difference; if you are only attributing last click revenue to the email channel, it will be reflected in a restricted budget. If you can attribute email’s influence on overall sales, you are more likely to get the money to achieve the greatest returns from email.

Why is this important now?

Thanks to the global economic slowdown, there will be less money in the customer’s pockets and the fight for conversion will be a tough one. Thanks to channel migration, (offline to online) online sales have been growing for several years, sometimes in the face of reducing overall sales.  This growth cannot continue and soon it will be back to the slog of battle for market share. Email will be a key weapon in the marketer’s armoury and your strategy and tactics will either be pulling customers from your competitors or they will be pushing them the other way.

I’ll leave you with a quote from Karin Von Abrams’s* perspective of the DMA benchmark report;

“Time, effort and insight can partially compensate for lack of financial resources. But companies that don’t find either time or money to devote to their email campaigns may soon face the consequences. It probably won’t be too pleasant at the bottom of a two-tier email marketplace.”

*Karin Von Abrams, Senior Analyst, eMarketer

Previously, I wrote an article about the number of different ways that common domain names get mis-spelt. In the case of “Hotmail”, I stopped counting once we got into three figures ! It was a tongue in cheek article, although it did have a serious point to make about the importance of list hygiene.

More recently a new dimension to this topic has been emerging. All email marketers should be familiar with the principle of spam traps – ISPs co-opt dormant email addresses, and monitor the e-marketing traffic that is sent to these addresses. The rationale is that good email programs know who their dormant records are, and will suppress them from their broadcast activities. Those programs that continue to use these addresses are regarded as being more lax in the list hygiene standards that they apply. In turn, this informs spam filter and / or mail blocking decisions that are applied against these programs. Ultimately, that’s bad news for your email program’s sender reputation metrics.

However, a close scrutiny of even “clean” lists will identify email addresses that – in theory – ought not to work. Let’s take guy.hanson@homail.com as an example. The initial assumption is that this should have been guy.hanson@hotmail.com, but that it was mis-typed at point of data entry. However, despite multiple uses, this address has never generated a bounce notification, which is what one might have reasonably expected. In addition to the sender reputation implications, this is bad news for your campaign response metrics, which are being diluted as a result of because you are broadcasting to addresses that will never generate positive response behaviour.

So the next assumption is that maybe “www.homail.com” is actually a valid domain. That’s an easy one to prove – put it into your web browser, and don’t be surprised when it re-routes to www.live.com ! That’s right – Microsoft has registered a lot of the most common mis-spellings as valid domains, and it is not a big leap of faith to believe that at least part of the reason for this to get a handle of the email traffic that is being sent to these invalid domains. Not convinced ? Try “hotamil.com”, “hortmail,com”, “otmail.com”, “hotamail.com” – same result. Behold – a new spam trap is born !

Hotmail is also not the only ISP to be doing this. AOL does something similar, and you will see the same effect with the likes of “a0l,com” ( with a zero ) and “aool.com”, both of which re-route to “aol.com”.

Of course, some of these mis-spellings are not necessarily mis-spellings at all. It’s the same principle as the smarter SEO programs which, in addition to leveraging their most popular search keywords, will also extend their reach to include incorrect variations of the same. So if you got to “hotnail.com”, you won’t be able to access your inbox, but you will find some great deals on manicures ! It strikes one as being an almost parasitic relationship, and Hotnail must benefit from shedloads of inadvertent web traffic – especially with “n” being right next to “m” on a standard QWERTY keyboard. “Hotmale.com” is another good case in point, although I wouldn’t recommend this website to those of a less broad minded disposition !

So what should e-marketers be doing about these mis-spellings, especially as they could be generating negative sender reputation consequences for your email programs ? A good starting point is to extract a list of all your “never bounced / never opened / never clicked” addresses. Sort them by most common domain first, identify all the obvious mis-spellings, and suppress them. There are also third party tools available on the web that can do this for you.
 
Then make sure that you are fixing the problem at source. Making double opt-in your preferred permissioning mechanism is the gold standard solution. Failing this, validated opt-in, double entry of the email address ( to mitigate against finger fumbles ) or real time domain validation would all represent effective solutions to the problem.

Ultimately, it’s all about recognising that good data hygiene practices are fundamental to a healthy set of sender reputation metrics. Good email marketers will already know this, but even for them the science of email deliverability is not as black and white as was once the case. Increasingly, it is a case of learning to read between the lines, and list hygiene practices such as the ones described in this post can certainly be expected to become more commonplace as a result.

There have been many announcements over the last few months regarding the various types of inbox filtering being deployed by various webmail clients. At first they look pretty harmless, with the rules that the ISP’s intend to use ranging from the ambiguous, to the algorithmic detail. If you take the metrics that Google claim they are going to use to identify “wanted” email, it seems they are trying to find out how interested the recipient is in the emails they are sent.

Google’s metrics

- Messages read then deleted
- Messages deleted without being read
- Messages replied to
- Frequency of receiving/reading

As marketers, the only metric we can really measure, is the frequency of receiving/reading the emails. (How many people reply to marketing emails anyway?)This  reinforces the need to focus on individual engagement.

Although there have been one or two conspiracy theory mutterings regarding what might be motivating these changes, you can’t get away from the fact that they will be improving the user experience. And this is what the ISP’s want. If you are happy with the clarity of your inbox, and the management of your inbound mail, you’ll most likely stay with your provider, allowing them to gain further behavioural data, and serve you targeted advertising (and make themselves money). Let’s face it, as a web mail user, it might be free to use, but the trade off is the advertising exposure and revenue.

So this rush to improve customer experience is unlikely to stop. The fact is it’s going to become increasingly difficult to send poorly targeted and conceived campaigns. These campaigns will likely see a gradual decline in response rates, initially blamed on recession (although you can open an email for free), but as likely to be caused by inbox filtering. No matter how good an email marketer you are, you can’t stop the effects of economic slowdown. What you can do is start thinking how you can improve the effectiveness of your email campaigns, and getting into (and staying in) the inbox, is a good place to start.

Sending an email campaign in this new future could become one of the most nerve wracking experiences for the modern day marketer.

• What are my customers going to think of it?
• What if most of my customers don’t open it?
• What if these same customers haven’t opened for a while?
• Could this email discourage my interested customers from opening the next few emails?
• Am I going to lose them forever?
• What if my competitors are doing it better?
• Will I need to spend more money on acquisition?

And ultimately,  if you reduce the ability to influence your existing customers, sales will suffer, and with the costs of getting new ones up to 8 times higher, it’s going to hurt the bottom line.

But it’s not all bad news, in fact for some it’s going to be a big benefit as the inbox will become less cluttered. If yours is one of the “wanted” emails a recipient receives, the inbox filtering should help your message receive the attention it deserves. So for those that are prepared to invest in effective segmentation and targeting for their email campaigns, the future is bright, with email likely to become more effective..  So, we are back to recipient engagement once more, seen as a nice to have in the past, but now vital to protect the value of your email programme.

But it will mean the “one size fits all” weekly newsletter needs to be relegated to the past.

The ability to measure engagement has been with us for a while, and those in the email deliverability circle have been deploying this type of segmentation to successfully manage deliverability for some time. It must now be used to decide who wants to hear from you, those that need a rest for a while, and those who are sick to death of your emails. If the Marketer doesn’t do this segmentation, the Webmail companies certainly will, and once someone’s gone, there’s no going back.

Benjamin Franklin certainly wasn’t talking about email deliverability when he said, “It takes many good deeds to build a good reputation, and only one bad one to lose it,” however this quote could easily apply to the factors impacting ISPs’ email filtering decisions.

A recent Return Path study confirms that a marketer’s sender reputation is the key to achieving high inbox placement rates and avoiding the spam folder. Return Path’s Analytics Team reviewed data on more than 18 million IP addresses, collected from 30 of the world’s top ISPs and other large-volume mail receivers. These ISPs represent mailboxes in North America, South America, Europe and Asia.

In total, there are three major categories of filtering decisions:

1. Reputation: A quantitative measurement of the desirability of email based on the reputation of the sending server’s IP address. This is affected by a variety of weighted factors, however complaints and list hygiene (i.e., unknown users, spam traps) have the greatest impact.
2. Infrastructure: How your mail server is configured, including the use of authentication protocols like reverse DNS, SPF, SenderID and DKIM. Having a good infrastructure lets the ISPs know you are making an effort to follow their protocols, while failing to have these basics in place makes you look unsophisticated at best and possibly malicious at worst.
3. Content: Filtering based on content has gone way beyond the days when words like “free,” “discount” and “save” triggered spam filters. Today, ISPs apply these filters later on in the process and only on messages coming from IPs where the reputation or infrastructure signals are unclear. In addition, they now search out features of the message that correlate with complaints, spam trap hits and other “negative” signals.

Having good sending practices is the key to building and maintaining a reputable sender reputation score. The higher your score, the more likely it is that your email will reach the inbox.

As the chart below shows, IPs with low Sender Scores (below 60) are rejected at the gateway at an extraordinarily high rate. In the mid-range (60-79), the amount of rejected email goes down slightly, but the amount of email filtered goes up. It is only at the very highest levels (80-100) that email is routinely “accepted” into the ISP system. In fact, IPs with a Sender Score of 100 are 38% more likely to get into the inbox than those with a Sender Score of 50.

Establishing a good Sender Score, maintaining it and monitoring any fluctuations to it are integral to the health of your email program. After all, messages that don’t reach the inbox won’t drive activity, engagement or purchases – essential actions for realizing email ROI.

Your reputation and your Sender Score are well within your control. If Ben Franklin’s quote about reputation were applied to email deliverability, the “good deeds” he refers to are all related to your sending practices. The better your practices, the higher your Sender Score and the more email will reach the inbox. Don’t know your Sender Score? Visit Return Path’s free reputation portal: www.senderscore.org.